My brother Weston was born and raised 20 miles north of Big Sur in Carmel. Carmel is not Big Sur. Carmel is “town”. And so Weston Nicholas Call, despite being a revered and impassioned Big Sur evangelist and integrated member of that community, is after all (sorry Weston), a “towny”.
It’s confusing to know whether or not we write about the people we’ve lost in the present or past tense. He was my brother, and he is my brother. He was from Carmel, and therefore forever is from Carmel. But to keep referring to Weston in the present feels somehow out of touch or in denial, and yet to always refer to Weston in the past tense feels inaccurately bleak and sad and also out of touch. It’s both, somehow. Past and present. Two things at once. Timeless. In the middle.
I think Weston and I wrestled (wrestle?) with this idea a lot—the gray area; the ways in which two things are true at once. And for Weston, when it came to Big Sur, he’d been making a life of the gray area. He was himself somewhat of a tourist there when he was younger, and yet he also belonged deeply to that community as a local later in life. He was both, and he had both perspectives, and an equal amount of compassion and care for both of those perspectives.
To me, people who have this dual simultaneous view on things are rare, and the people who actually create things out of it are even more rare. Our politicians divide us into black and white, democrat or republican. Our news cycles insist we pick a side. Vaccines are either a miracle of medicine, or an evil creation by bad actors. We must choose to be vegans or pure carnivores. It’s too normal to pick a side. And at the risk of speaking out of turn, my sense is that in areas like Big Sur—undeniably beautiful but delicate corners of our world (Yosemite, Bali, Tulum, etc)—a theme of tourist vs local has arisen, or at least is ripe to emerge, and it’s tempting to choose one or the other. But what a noble and sustainable concept to consider mingling the two somehow, bridging the gap, unifying. This was who Weston was. This was the gray area he lived in.
It’s easy to view the issue through the lense of whether tourism is good or bad; whether we choose to encourage people to visit or discourage visitation. And there is a place for that argument to be had. Over tourism is a thing. But the more difficult conversation to have is around how to journey to a place, and it requires a special willingness to educate and to be educated—to have humility as a traveler and compassion as a local—special points of view that Weston had, and points of view that I think we can all adapt. This is not easy.
Just two months after Weston died, I took a trip to Europe. It was his trip, one that he had tickets booked for. Unlike any other trip I’ve taken, this one felt flooded with some kind of divine support. It was inspired, and deeply sad all at once. I felt as if the places I was going to go and the people I was going to meet would, actually, in no uncertain terms, be the places that he would have gone and would have been the people that he would have met. And so I took my interactions seriously, and was methodical about them, and, at the same time, was loose about where they were or how they might come about. I had no control, anyways. But I paid attention in a new way, if only out of reverence for the duty of replacing this interaction that was for someone else, my brother, who I know they’d otherwise never forget.
I spent a week in Biarritz, France. It reminded me of the best version of a California Winter. Crisp cool air, gold sun, light wind, short days and picturesque waves. It was all I was hoping France would be.
One day, as a new powerful Atlantic swell pulsed into Europe, I packed my wetsuit into my backpack, and simply walked south along the ocean, waves pounding the shore, skies blue. I was board-less and destination-less and was simply gambling that both would materialize eventually if I just kept heading South.
At one point, a few miles down the road, I remember I tested my luck and hopped on a bus. I got on, and was able to ride in the vague general direction of where I thought waves might be, but when I finally decided to get off, I had no clue how to pay. Put the coins in the machine? Press the button? I remember in the midst of my confusion, as I held the bus up, the driver patiently signaled to me to come to him. I did, and he counted the Euro’s in my hand, separating out coins on my palm as if he’d done this before, organizing my money into piles and finally taking what I owed, which wasn’t nearly everything I had.
I wandered off onto a beach just beyond as far as the bus would take me before it looped back to Biarritz, and I felt like I’d entered a new countryside. A beautiful long pebbled beach in between France and Spain laid before me. Mist from the swell peppered the warm rocks. It was just me, wandering, hoping, with naive determination that I would somehow surf.
I walked a mile down the beach. The beach was full of fist sized stones and larger boulders. I focused as I hopped south toward an old-world breakwater fishing boat inlet where I saw people gathered in a nearby coastal parking lot. Among them were undeniably high level surfers, Red Bull and Quiksilver stickers covering their 10 foot boards. They helped each other squeeze into their inflatable vests and and did breathing exercises after triple checking their equipment. It was serious. Out front, two 25 foot waves, a left and a right, slow-motion drained into the channel outside the fish-boat breakwater. I found waves.
Typically in surfing, you don’t really ask strangers if they have a board you can borrow. Thats a big ask. You can ask for wax, and you can maybe ask for a leash. But not a board. And certainly not for the kind of board required to ride waves like that. I meandered around the parking lot, trying to muster up the courage to ask the forbidden question. Twenty minutes went by. I couldn’t do it. But there I was, wetsuit in my backpack at the destination of an aimless search for exactly what I found. I had to at least start a conversation. My good fortune had unfolded too far to not meet it halfway. This was after all where Weston would have been.
In that moment, an old beat up Volkswagen pulled into the lot, three stickerless surfboards piled to the ceiling in his passenger seat. I can’t remember if there was a hula girl dangling down from the drivers ear view mirror, but there might as well have been. I swear this was the French Weston. He parked at the end of the lot, away from all the pros, stepped out in his sandals, shorts and tank top, and ran to the bluff to watch the waves with his coffee mug in hand. This was my guy.
I walked over to him, and said something. I don’t remember how I opened the conversation. I was nervous because I knew what I was after. But he greeted me and treated me well, like I belonged there. I explained that I had found this wave randomly after an aimless journey from town, and that I was board-less. He opened up more and told me where he was from. I opened up more too and told him about Weston. And when I did, I remember he was connected to that in a way that felt like he had almost known it, like he was at the destination of an aimless journey, too; like he had anticipated our run in without being able to put his finger on how or why. He suddenly felt familiar, like family.
Vincent Cassoly was (and is) his name, and he gave me a board. He gave me wax and a leash too, and he paddled out with me through through the fishing boat breakwater, and we surfed together until dark. Mission accomplished.
I’d like to think I journeyed well this day. I’d like to say I showed up that day in a way that Weston would appreciate, with as much humility as possible, as a traveler to a foreign place. And I’d like to think that Weston would be proud of Vincent, too—ready and willing to help a visitor who, at that point in their journey, desperately needed some guidance and support. I felt Weston through Vincent in a visceral way. I don’t feel like I’m manufacturing some fake positive story (which is easy to do) when I say Weston sent me Vincent. But I also believe that Weston—one all too familiar with the aimless journey down the coast seeking support and guidance—sent Vincent me. What a gift to be able to transform someone else’s day like Vincent did. We all rotate in our roles as guests and hosts in life, and like Weston did with particular clarity, it’d be best if we all remembered that.
This is not a perfect metaphor. I don’t do well with the idea that happy-go-lucky stories like this map themselves perfectly as all-encompassing-lessons onto the whole of a much more confusing and complicated life. The reality of the ways in which tourism affects locals, for instance, is so much more…gray, and that’s ok. But if we can at least try and keep an eye out for the good ones, that’s a legacy I know Weston would be proud of.